Over the years, I've occasionally featured little essays on this blog called "Tales of My Mother" or "Tales of My Father" or "Tales of My Childhood" and so on. For today, I decided to pick out a Tale of My Mother to rerun here so I went back and started reading over them. Later today, I will post the one I selected but given what's in the news these days, it seemed appropriate to run just the beginning of Tales of My Mother #7, which originally ran here on 11/8/12. Here it is…
I was an only child. When that fact came up in conversation, I used to tell people, "My folks figured that if you get it right the first time, don't press your luck." The truth is that I was a very difficult birth. I was due on February 29, 1952 and my mother spent most of that day and all of March 1 in a hospital in agonizing pain, unable to deliver. Finally on March 2nd, they went in and got me. She was a month shy of 31 at the time and after I was out, the doctor who'd poked around inside her in order to deliver me told her, "Do not under any circumstances let yourself get pregnant again. You will never make it through another birth alive."
Her gynecologist later concurred. That little fact is always on my mind when I read debates about abortion and come across someone who believes they should be illegal with no exceptions. What would have probably happened if my mother had gotten pregnant again is that either she would have aborted or both she and that fetus would have died. The latter option doesn't sound particularly "pro-life" to me.
She told me more than once that if she had gotten in a "family way" then, she would not have hesitated to abort. The gamble that the doctors were wrong was not worth losing her life and leaving my father and me without her. As far as I know, it was never necessary. They were lucky…and also very careful. After my father died in '91, she asked me to clean out his drawer and not tell her about anything in there that I thought she wouldn't have wanted to know about. They had no secrets from each other but each had one small drawer in their bedroom which the other agreed to never open. I have not cleaned out hers yet though she told me once it held letters and photos of male friends who preceded my father. His had nothing I felt she'd care about but it did contain an awful lot of very old and unopened condoms.
Shortly after I posted the above here, I did get around to cleaning out my mother's "private" drawer. There were papers in there from and about a man to whom she was briefly married. That marriage was quickly annulled and then she married my father and they were inseparable and wildly happy with each other for the rest of his life.
There were no photos of any male except me. There was also a very old Bible — so old its binding had gone brittle and it could no longer hold the pages in place. And there were some photos of her mother and a $500 bill. The $500 bill would have been exciting had it not been from a game of Monopoly.
I have quite a few e-mails today from folks telling me…
That everyone in their area wears masks in public places or…
That no one in their area wears masks in public places or (mostly)…
That some people in their area wear masks in public places and others don't.
I think it's safe to say that it varies from place to place just as the density of COVID cases varies from place to place. There are probably other variables including age and what kind of public place we're talking about. Anyway, I don't need any more messages telling me how it is in your neck of the woods, thank you.
A couple of folks asked me, "How will you decide it's safe to stop wearing masks at all?" Easy answer: When my doctor tells me it is.
I've said this before and I don't know why it's controversial for some people. I think it helps in this world to have a good doctor…someone you trust. I listen to mine when he tells me to increase this vitamin or stop taking that medication. Why shouldn't I listen to him when he tells me to get a booster shot or wear a mask?
He's not infallible but it's been my experience that medical advice that comes from a real doctor — someone who has earned your respect, not just someone with a diploma on the wall — is right at least 85% of the time. By contrast — and again, this is just my experience; yours may vary — medical advice from non-doctors who think they know about medicine is right less than 25%. I actually/truly/literally believe that certain people I've known have died from following bad layperson advice.
Yes, I know a great doctor is not always easy to find, especially when decent health insurance is sometimes outta reach. I think it's worth the effort to find someone you can trust and even if you can't, don't trust someone who studied medicine at YouTube University or who says, "I read somewhere on the Internet…" Somewhere on the Internet, there are people who will insist that at this very minute, they're playing Pinochle with Elvis, J.F.K. and Andy Kaufman. And Andy's winning.
George Perez was a real good guy and real good artist and if you administered Sodium Pentothal to everyone who ever worked with or even knew him, I don't think you could find a single negative thought about the guy. Maybe — just maybe — you could find a little jealousy at his popularity and his skills. But he really was an example of how talent plus hard work can be a winning recipe for success.
George began drawing comics around 1973 and if you arranged all his work in the sequence in which he did it, you could watch a beginner just get better and better with each job. Come to think of it, there might have been some grumbling about George from the inkers who had to ink the pages he drew because he tended to put in everything. There were easier ways to draw those pages but George never took them…and the work was done with such care and dedication that no one grumbled for long.
He stopped drawing comics in 2013 due to eye problems, resumed soon after, then stopped due to heart problems. Late last year, he saddened everyone when he announced he had pancreatic cancer and had decided to let nature take its course. Everyone I saw was impressed with the mature, upbeat manner in which he handled it. His friend Constance Eza wrote this morning that George "passed away yesterday, peacefully at home." He was 67 years old and had his wife Carol and their family at his side.
The photo above is of George at the 2006 Comic-Con International, pointing with pride that a comic book cover he'd drawn had been made into a U.S. postage stamp. It was but one of many, many things this fine man had to be proud of.
The other night in London, there was a concert to honor the late Stephen Sondheim. Here's what I think is the finale with, among others, Bernadette Peters, Imelda Staunton, Petula Clark and Michael Ball…
It's 74 days until this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego…and I am here being optimistic that (a) it will happen and (b) that I will be there. I'm currently prepping panels based on both assumptions and things are looking pretty good that way.
Based on the same assumptions, my friends who run The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog are revving up with a new season of podcasts and news coverage of what's going to happen at the con. They are in no way affiliated with the actual event or the folks who run it but the Unofficial Blog site is still a valuable tool for attendees.
This coming Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM Pacific Time, they'll be launching their new season of podcasts with their very special guest, me. You can watch it live on their site or I'll have a replay later on this site. That's two chances you have to see me make the usual fool of myself.
In the meantime, I got an e-mail this morning from a fellow who I'll quote in part here. He goes on and on about how it's stupid to wear masks these days. He's angry that Comic-Con International will be requiring them and he writes, "…no one wears masks anymore at indoor businesses. No one wears masks anymore, period!!!" Which indicates to me that he and I do not patronize the same businesses. I see lots of people wearing masks at indoor businesses I frequent and I am sometimes one of them.
He quotes a Florida judge as saying masks are simply not necessary at this point and calls it all "a political power play." I suspect that judge was ruling on whether she thought certain laws requiring masks were in accord with existing laws, not whether they should be worn. There's a big difference there. Here's my simple position on this: I don't respect any opinion on the wearing of masks that doesn't come from a licensed, experienced DOCTOR (caps for emphasis), preferably one who specializes in infectious diseases.
Frankly, I think wearing a mask or not wearing a mask because of what a politician or judge or TV pundit says is stupid. You might just as well ask your plumber if he thinks you ought to have open heart surgery. (And I'm not suggesting doctors are infallible or that 100% of them agree. I just have this odd theory that they generally know more about medicine than politicians, pundits or plumbers.)
Anyway, then the fellow who wrote me wrote, "I'm sure that, as one of the main speakers and leaders at Comic-Con, you could get the fine folks running the event to reconsider the masks policy." Yes, if you want to formulate a responsible, intelligent health policy, listen to the guy who writes dialogue for Groo the Wanderer. Who could be more qualified than that?
I also don't think it's their policy. I think it has a lot to do with the state, the city and the convention center. The San Diego Convention Center, by the way, is a non-profit public benefit corporation created by the City of San Diego. And I'm fairly sure that all those agencies, in formulating the current policy, consulted with DOCTORS. Gee, I wonder why they didn't ask my opinion.
Is the policy over-cautious? Maybe. I don't know. I have several friends who currently have COVID and while their symptoms seem to be mild, there are still people out there suffering mightily and perhaps dying. Here are current stats for California. We seem to be near the end of this thing but we've thought that before and been horribly wrong so I don't think over-cautious is a terrible thing. I also don't think wearing a mask is any more oppressive than not sneezing on someone else or not coughing in their face.
What do we have here? Oh, it looks like Albert Brooks doing his ventriloquist routine on The Ed Sullivan Show for January 31, 1971. It took a lot of guts to do this routine on that show on live TV.
Comics who did Ed's show used to always tell of the agony of having to do their act earlier that afternoon at the dress rehearsal. The audience for those, they all said, was largely unresponsive…a lot of derelicts using the free tickets to get off the street for a little while, a lot of little old ladies who were out shopping just wanting to get off their feet…
Ed, it was said, would often panic over the non-response to a comic's act and order that it be cut down for the air show. He was also known to cut an act entirely. I wonder how "Danny and Dave" made the cut…
One of those folks who wanted me to answer a question without giving their name read my obit of Neal Adams and asked…
In what you wrote about Adams, you said "God Help You if you were a young kid showing him your portfolio and asking him for a critique." I gather that means he was rough on newcomers. Do you think he was right to do this? Do you think beginners should be subjected to this kind of treatment? I believe you wrote once that Bob Kane looked at your work when you were a teenager and told you to give up trying to be a writer.
Yeah, but that was Bob Kane. Even at that age, I knew not to take him seriously. I believe he offered to look at my work not to advise me on any possible career but to see if I could be of any immediate use to him. And he had no use for what I did. When someone slams your work, it helps to remember that, first of all, that's just one person…and the greatest talents who've ever lived all have at least one person and maybe even a million people who hate what they do. Also, of course, not all opinions are honest…or informed.
Over the years, I knew perhaps a dozen artists who showed their work to Neal and didn't get the response for which they were hoping. And what they were hoping for was not necessarily praise. More often, it was the answer to the question, "Where do I go from here? What's my next step?" I've heard that there were times when Neal saw a new kid's work, picked up the phone and recommended him or her for a job. If he did that, good for him. What the folks I knew personally usually got from him was the answer to a question they were not asking: "What do I have to do to get a job working on super-hero comics for Marvel or DC?"
By contrast, Jack Kirby never discouraged anyone, including some youngsters who perhaps could have been helped by a bit of discouragement. He urged beginners not to draw like him or like anyone other than themselves. And if he really saw potential in you, he would tell you to aim way higher than working for DC and Marvel on material they'd own and control.
I do understand the working premise of "tough love." I understand the concept of the drill sergeant who treats you like dirt to make you a better soldier. I just don't think that's what most people need on their way up. I think they need honesty about who and where they are, a fair assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe being pointed in the right direction. If someone comes along with the potential to be the next Charles Schulz, he shouldn't be told, "Here's what you have to do if you want to get a job inking Spider-Man."
Neal was rough on some people but I didn't mean to suggest he was never of help. A lot of people got into the business because of Neal Adams even if his critiques could be kinda torturous. And a lot more made good careers for themselves by not listening to him. Just because someone has more experience than you do, that doesn't mean their evaluation of your work is valid. When people ask me how I've managed to be a working professional writer for more than half a century, I sometimes tell them the secret. It involved not listening to Bob Kane.
An outfit called Musical Mayhem Productions stages plays and theater workshops for performers ages 4-19. They're based in Elk Grove, California, which is in Sacramento County. This weekend, they're staging The Addams Family and later this month, it's The Little Mermaid.
This is from a production of Guys and Dolls Junior and the performers are Karoline Ongjoco and Henry Pullen. Sit down, you're rockin' the crib…
Longtime readers of this blog can probably guess how I feel about the impending prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned along with some other possibilities from the Far-Right Wish List. I'm not writing about it because I don't think I have anything to say that isn't being said (and said better) by countless others. If and when I do, you'll see it here.
Please don't think that if I don't write about something here, I don't care about it. That goes especially when someone notable dies and I don't write about them. I just might not have anything to say that I think is worth saying. Goodness knows I post enough that isn't worth my time to write or your time to read.
In other news: Currently, I have 4,823 "friends" on Facebook and over a thousand requests. But I can only occasionally add anyone because Facebook sometimes thinks I've already hit the 5,000 "friend" limit and won't let me. I'm not snubbing anyone. Honest.
James Corden will soon step down as the host of The Late Late Show on CBS. My view of the man is just about identical to the one expressed here by my pal Paul Harris. I like Corden in certain special bits on his show which I watch on YouTube. (I always watch his Carpool Karaoke segments just to see if my house is in them. He drives around my neighborhood a lot.)
I liked him as a host on the Tony Awards and a few other gigs. I even liked him in the movies of Cats, The Prom and Into the Woods. But I rarely watch his nightly show where everything and everyone are fabulous and wonderful and awesome and everything merits a standing ovation.
And Paul's right: It's kind of pointless to speculate who may replace him. There's sometimes an obvious choice for an 11:30 talk show slot the way some of us predicted Stephen Colbert would take over Letterman's program. But 12:30 is almost always someone no one saw coming. No one predicted Conan O'Brien or Tom Snyder or Craig Kilborn or Craig Ferguson or Seth Meyers or Mr. Corden. I would guess though that the folks at CBS are at least seriously looking to see if there's a worthy candidate who isn't white, male or neither.
There must be. But I have no idea if they'd go with that person. I'll also guess that a major requirement for the job is that the new host be real Internet-savvy and able to generate online content because that's becoming almost as important as putting a good show on conventional TV.
Paul wonders what Corden's going to do. I'll tell you what I'd like to see him do. My favorite musical comedy is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and at the time he got the call about hosting The Late Late Show, Corden was in talks about starring in a new Broadway revival of it. I believe he's occasionally said he really wants to do that someday and I'd sure like to see it. I think he'd be fabulous and wonderful and awesome and would merit a standing ovation. But he might be too busy starring in every movie Hollywood makes adapting a Broadway musical to the screen.
Here's a very good obit/bio of Neal Adams by Alex Grand and Michael Dean.
If you've been reading all the remembrances of Neal from his colleagues, you probably have a pretty good grasp of how important he was to so many careers and to changing the face of comics in the seventies and eighties. I was most impressed by the fact that he was a freelance talent who would not and could not be treated as a peon. This was not just because he drew so well. There were a lot of guys in comics who drew well but, having grown up in The Depression and not knowing any other way to make a somewhat-secure living than filling pages for DC and Marvel, they allowed The System to treat them as expendable and lucky to have any income at all.
Photo by Bruce Guthrie
On my first visit to the DC offices in 1970, I sat in on a meeting in which an editor berated one of his longtime freelance artists. I won't name names here but the artist was one of those reliable guys who worked hard on every page and who delivered a consistent product and always on time. Until you're put in the position of editing comics, you might not realize how valuable those guys are. There's a certain "assembly line" mentality that's inevitable in the production process even on the best books. One artist has to get his work in before the next one can do what he has to do…and somewhere down that conveyor belt, there are deadlines that simply must be met. If one person hands in work late…or hands in work that needs to be redone…the other people working on the book can suffer and so can their work.
This longtime freelance artist was always on time and the work was always solid — maybe not spectacular but solid…and probably way better than the company deserved for the page rates it paid. Still, this editor felt the need to be a bit of a tyrant.
He'd had the check for the work already made out and as he looked over the pages the artist was handing in, he dangled that check. He was going to give it to the artist, of course. But he had to play out the fantasy that the work was just barely acceptable and the artist had better do a better job next time. He literally waved the paycheck in front of the artist and said, "I don't know if you earned this…that panel should have had more of a background…I don't know if I can give you this check…"
I saw this little ritual played out. And the fact that the editor didn't mind me seeing this…didn't mind me witnessing him humiliating this longtime contributor a little…that should tell you a lot.
The artist, put soundly in his place, mumbled a bit about how he'd try harder next time. And he left with that check and also with the next script he would take home and draw. When I encountered him in the halls later, I told him what a shame it was that he'd been put through that humbling. He shrugged and said, of the editor, "He always does that. But he always has work for me." As if that made it right.
So, uh, what does this have to do with Neal Adams? Just this: No one at DC or anywhere ever dared to do that to Neal Adams. And they became less likely to do that to any freelancer because Neal was around, reminding freelancers of their value, reminding them that they made the product that the company sold. The folks in management listened to him. A lot of them were afraid of him.
And like I said, it wasn't just because he drew so well. A lot of it was because they all knew that Neal made Big Bucks in advertising and could walk away from comics in a nanosecond if you didn't treat him right. The freelancer who had to grovel a bit to get a check he'd clearly earned didn't have that going for him. He also didn't have Neal's ability to stand up for himself or others and Neal was also really good at telling bosses they didn't know what the hell they were doing.
I also saw an example of this on that first visit to the DC offices…
Alex Toth was one of the most-respected artists in the field and he had just written, penciled and inked (but not lettered) an issue of the Hot Wheels comic book DC was publishing. It was #5 and the night before my pal Steve Sherman and I flew from Los Angeles to New York, I went by Alex's house in Hollywood, picked up the original art and I hand-delivered it to the DC offices back there two days later.
For this story, Alex had done something different. He divided every page into eight panels of the same size and shape, and he put black in the gutters between those panels. Here — take a look at a couple of pages from that story. You can click on the image and make it larger…
As you can see, it was a very "talky" story. Alex, who complained about every single thing in every single job, was always bitching about too much dialogue and too many captions in comics. And then almost every time he wrote his own script, he'd put in three times as much copy as the writers he insisted put in too much.
I delivered his pages, which of course were in black-and-white. Alex had left space for someone in New York to put in the lettering and the story was immediately assigned to John Costanza, who did that lettering. Because Alex had in many panels left too much room for copy, there were blank spaces around many of the word balloons and someone in the office had to go in and extend the art to fill in those gaps. The staffer assigned to do this was a gent named Sal Amendola, who later distinguished himself as a pretty good artist on his own.
And Sal was also assigned to do something else to Alex's pages. The Production Department told him to take the black out between the panels. The reason? "We don't do that here at DC."
The real reason? DC's Production Department liked to "fix" things…to change what the freelancers did. It was not all that different from the way that reliable freelancer had to be demeaned a little so The Boss could prove he was The Boss. It was why they insisted on redrawing the way Jack Kirby drew Superman in Jimmy Olsen. It was why they pasted an old Curt Swan Superman head over the Superman head that Alex drew for a Super Friends special comic he did for them. It was why a lot of arbitrary, gratuitous changes were made. They wanted to be able to say, "We saved it!"
Because I was kind of Alex's rep at that moment, Sal came to me — this is a few days after I'd delivered the pages — and told me what he'd been assigned to do. We both knew what damage this would do to Alex's composition…to his placement of blacks within the panels. But Sal had no power to overrule the Production Department and if he'd refused to do it, someone else would have done it. I asked him, "What are you going to do?"
He said, "Wait for Neal."
This conversation took place around 2 PM. Sal filled in the art around the balloons but didn't touch the black between the panels. Around 4 PM, Neal arrived at DC and, as he often did, took over a little office with a drawing table in it. It was directly across the hall from an office shared by editors Dick Giordano and Julius Schwartz. Sal and I went in with the Toth pages and started to explain to Neal about what the Production Department wanted to do to them.
He got it instantly. He said, "Let me take those" and he carried the pages over to the Production Department and closed the door behind him. Ten minutes later, he came out, handed the pages back to Sal and said, "Leave the gutters the way they are." And the comic was printed, as you can see, with the black gutters, just as Alex wanted. A lot of people in the field thought it was an outstanding art job — which it was — but few knew that it might not have been as good had it not been for Neal Adams. And for that matter, Sal Amendola.
No, I don't know what he said to the men behind that closed door. I would imagine he talked about the integrity of Toth's composition, and because he was that guy who had his own syndicated strip at age 21 and was raking in all that dough in advertising work, they listened to him. Neal had this way of making you feel like he knew more than you even when he didn't. The contrast between the way they treated him and the way that longtime freelancer had been treated was startling. Neal had a lot to do with the entire industry putting more value on the freelancers and treating them with more respect.
Everyone writing these days about Neal has their favorite work. I liked his Batman way more than any other existing character on which he worked. I thought the best inker for his work was, far and away, Neal Adams. I loved certain covers he did and certain illustrations…and not always the ones that other people thought were his best.
But I think his greatest contribution was the way in which he helped the comic book industry grow up. I'm not certain it would even exist today if it hadn't.
A man charged the stage at the Hollywood Bowl this evening and attacked comedian Dave Chappelle. The would-be assailant was apprehended and he's in big trouble. There's talk he may be banned from attending the Academy Awards for ten years.
